New Rare Tumor Center will offer some hope

1:19 PM,
Mar. 7, 2014

Written by

Jeffery Edenfield
and Larry Gluck

Greenville Health System's Institute for Translational Oncology Research (ITOR) has just launched the nation's first center dedicated exclusively to the treatment and research of rare cancers.

Rare cancers affect one in five cancer patients. Despite that, patients with rare tumors typically don't have standardized treatments because their individual cancers - which can affect as few as 150 people - are so poorly understood. Likewise, clinical trials aren't routinely available for these cancers and so patients may not have access to new potentially life-extending therapies.